The album released this year as Neu! ’86 had another life as Neu! 4, originally released in 1995, nearly a decade after its initial recording, itself a reunion of Neu!’s core of Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger. Neu! ’86 is the result of Rother reassembling the album from the original master tapes following Dinger’s death in 2008. All in all, then, it’s an odd hybrid, a reconstruction of an album that had its own ephemeral existence, first in bootlegs and later in a Dinger-sanctioned release. After three critically lauded, hugely influential albums, what might someone make of this — a work that might very well earn the “lost album” label?
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On first listen, Neu ’86 might prompt some panic. “Dänzing,” the second track and first ‘full’ song, sounds a bit like what one might expect from a Neu! album recorded in the mid-80s: a penchant for danceable pop rhythms and the sort of glossy sheen that’s as much a signifier of the era as any unfortunate sartorial choices or overabundance of hair product. Another sign of the era: the fifth song is a programmed-beat-driven sound collage titled “La Bomba (Stop Apartheid World-Wide!).”
Thankfully, the duo’s sense of experimentation and penchant for perfectly constructed rhythms becomes central here, just as it did in their earlier works. “Drive (Grundfunken)” applies scuzzed-out guitars over a loping bassline; it hearkens back to the group’s first album, with only the minimal drumbeat giving away the temporal distance. And the subdued interlude of “November,” the penultimate number, may for sheer simplicity (and no small amount of beauty) be the album’s highlight.
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Elsewhere, the same fondness for collages that manifests itself in “La Bomba” returns with mixed results. “Paradise Walk” begins with a turn towards auditory bliss that is soon broken by the introduction of a looping sound echoing a car alarm. There’s a similar sensibility afoot in “Euphoria,” a song whose title perhaps too literally encapsulates its idealized mood. Some of these moments sound jarring, but not in an encouraging way; instead, for a band whose discography has largely aged impeccably, these moments feel all too dated.
The moments when this album does shine are intriguing. It’s an odd cap to a legendary band’s discography and, even in this updated form, not the most essential part of that body of work. And given that Rother has begun touring again (with members of Sonic Youth and Tall Firs, under the name Hallogallo 2010), it remains to be seen where this album fits in with the story of Neu!.